Stumbling Upon
Happiness – Why the future won’t feel the way you think it will..

Daniel Gilbert

WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?

The harder you try to steer yourself into happy times, the
less likely you are to get there  because your navigation system is
hopelessly  up the creek..

Human brains, says Gilbert,  are constantly trying to predict
what will make them happy,  but they
usually get it wrong. They make us  believe, ,for example,  that things which sound nice to us now
will be just as nice in reality, and that awful events – divorce,
illness, bereavement – will be devastating. Yet our feelings now about
future events are actually a lousy guide to how we will feel when they actually
happen

The result is that we hold back from doing things we ought
because we overrate the emotional effect of failure and error, and we fling
ourselves into things we oughtn’t because we think the rewards   will be greater than they
are.  Then, when we  look back and ask ourselves where
we took a wrong turn, we distort the view in such a way that we learn nothing
from our mistakes.  The consolation
is that somewhere along the way, usually when we are not trying, we may
“stumble” on happiness.

Gilbert’s book explains how  and why our brains delude, trick
and misguide us into careering confidently down pathways that end in
frustration, disappointment and confusion.
As he himself makes clear,  the book is not a manual on how
to be happy. Gilbert seems to feel obliged, however, to offer some kind of practical  guidance
and,  rather rashly,  he promises at the start  to end the book with “ a simple
remedy “ for over-riding our
brains’ distortions.
This turns out to be a rather  limp bit of advice which ,  as the author himself observes
“you will almost certainly not accept”.

Never mind
–  rather as happiness itself
is to be found on the journey rather than at the destination ,  the joy of this book lies in the reading
rather than in some spurious self-help
pay-off.

SO WHAT’S NEW?

Nothing at all.  The
wisdom is old as the hills, and there are dozens of books that contain the
science. But this one
pulls it all together in the neatest, wittiest way possible..

HOW READER FRIENDLY IS IT?

If you didn’t laugh
at the parade of human folly laid out in this book, you’d have to cry, and
Gilbert makes certain that you laugh. In fact, if you are like this reviewer
you will giggle, splutter, guffaw and then possibly fall off your chair making
weird wheezing noises. It is not a book to  be read in public (or while
consuming food.)

BOFFIN-RATING

Gilbert is the Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is also the winner of the
American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for
an Early Career Contribution to Psychology.

OK?